 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the Ancestral lands of the Nakatshtang peoples. I'm David Terrio, archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Nicole Stott about her book, Back to Earth. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Wednesday, October 27th at 1 p.m., Nathaniel Philbrook will discuss Travels with George, his new book that recounts his own modern day journey based on George Washington's presidential excursions. And on Thursday, October 28th at 11 a.m., the next installment of our series for Young Learners National Archives Comes Alive brings us actor Neil Hartley portraying Washington Irving, the father of the American short story and author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The National Archives contains a wealth of NASA records in the Washington, D.C. area and at several of our archival locations across the country. Nearly 100 million pages of textual records, over a million photographs and thousands of reels of motion picture film and audio recordings. These records document NASA's long history of aeronautics research, flight tests, and manned and unmanned space exploration. NASA's story begins well before the space age with its predecessor in the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1915. From its origin just a dozen years after the Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk, NASA's mission today is to enable human expansion across the solar system and bring new knowledge and opportunities back to Earth. When our guest author Nicole Stott was aboard the International Space Station in 2009, she looked back to Earth and recognized the interconnectedness of our home planet. Today we'll hear stories from her time on the space station as well as insights she gained from scientists, activists, and change agents working to protect life on Earth for future generations. Nicole Stott is an astronaut, an artist, and mom who spent over 100 days in space aboard the International Space Station. After a 28-year career with NASA, she founded the Space for Art Foundation, and she speaks to audiences around the world. She is featured in National Geographic's One Strange Rock, and the painting she created in space is displayed at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Now let's hear from Nicole Stott. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much. It is really an honor to be here for the National Archives to include me in their author-speaker series. I am really, really thankful, and I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and hope that works. I was joking earlier that, you know, you can work on a space station, but sometimes it's difficult to operate Zoom. All right, I hope that is up and running. I wanted, first of all, and thankful again to see the book cover was shared. I didn't include this slide in my presentation for you today, so I'm just going to pick the picture off the front of the book and just let everybody know that that one picture that's on the front of the book is the picture that my mom always uses to remind me why she was afraid while I was in space. And as you can imagine, parents feel that way. And to me, I was out there working, yes, at the end of the space station. To her, it's a reminder that, that, oops, there's a dog. Hang on a second. Sorry about that. That's, you know, the life of doing presentations from home, but a bird flew through the backyard. Anyway, to my mom, that picture reminds her that NASA should have a rule for two hands on the space station at all times. So I just, I just thought I'd start with that. I wanted also to let everybody know that while I'm an astronaut who had these experiences in space and wrote this book, it's not intended as a memoir. I wanted really to bring back to Earth, hence the title, the experience that we've had in space as an international community for over 20 years now, peacefully, successfully, working in this, in this mechanical life support system, and how I think the best skill that we could all develop is to really learn how to work as a crew here on Spaceship Earth. Embedded in that were three lessons that I came home with. The first being, and these are very simple lessons. We all learn them early in life, and somehow they kind of go into the background, and I really would love for people to bring them back into their daily lives and thoughts. The first is we live on a planet. We are all Earthlings. And the only border that matters is that thin blue line of atmosphere that blankets and protects us all. And with this experience of going in space, I get asked a lot, what was it like? What was it like to be there? And I certainly want to share that experience in the book. This one picture is one that, in just one picture, reminds me kind of a collected memory of being in space. It's really, really beautiful. And even though it looks like it's this still silhouetted image of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, and this was on my ride home after my first flight, which was a long duration space flight. I had spent a little over three months on the International Space Station, and we were on our way home to our families. So I know I'm inside that little silhouetted Space Shuttle Atlantis with my six crew members. We've had a successful mission. We're on our way home. But I also know that while it looks like it's just hanging there still, that we're traveling at 17,500 miles an hour, or about five miles a second, which means we're orbiting the planet every 90 minutes. And so every 45 minutes or so, we get one of these stunning sunrises or sunsets out the window. And I know that my friend, my crewmate, Jeff Williams, who's still on the Space Station, took this really wonderful picture as a reminder. I think along the way we're all inspired for whatever is we're going to do in life, whatever, you know, kind of things that we're curious about. We discovered them somewhere along the way. And for me, honestly, that started with parents who shared what they loved with me. My mom was a very creative, still is kind of artsy, craftsy person. So I think I got that from her. My dad loved to build and fly small airplanes. And so as a family, we spent a lot of time out at the local airport here in Florida. And I developed a love for flying, not just wanting to know how to fly, but wanting to know how things fly, how airplanes fly. And through that discovered, really discovered that, you know, if you want to know how airplanes fly, why would you not want to know how rocket ships fly? And that led me to studying aeronautical engineering at school, wanting to continue to lift myself off the planet and airplanes, but also working for NASA as an engineer at the Kennedy Space Center, where I got to work up close and personal really with not just the hardware, the space shuttles themselves and seeing how they're built and how they work, but with some of the most outstanding people I have ever worked with. This is a picture of some of them out on the shuttle landing runway at Kennedy Space Center after an endeavor landing. And these people, and to this day, the people I think that work in the space program, they believe that the care and feeding of these spacecraft are their responsibility. And that's a really great group of people to work with. You know you're working with people that believe there are solutions to really challenging problems that have just kind of a work ethic of here's how we can, not why we can't, and have really discovered since those days that that is the best way to, you know, to approach problems, to overcome challenging things. It's certainly the kind of thing that leads you to believing that you might even be able to consider this idea of becoming an astronaut. And I had seen the moon landing as a young child six or seven years old, and I think even then you realize that that's a really extraordinary thing. But it wasn't until while I was working at Kennedy Space Center that I started thinking that it wasn't maybe just something for other special people to get to do, that maybe I could consider it. And so I spoke to mentors, people that I consider to be mentors at Kennedy, and they encouraged me really to do nothing more than pick up the pen and fill out the application. And while I did get an interview on the first application process, I didn't get selected, but they offered me a job working as a shuttle training aircraft flight engineer at Johnson Space Center. And so I moved to Houston, and I started flying on this airplane that you see in the bottom left picture, basically flying towards the ground, training astronauts how to land the space shuttle. And honestly, I didn't think it could get any better. I was also able to fly in these little T-38 jets that I had begged my entire time at Kennedy Space Center, any astronauts that came through, I begged to let them, you know, for them to take me on flights, but they always said no, as you can imagine. And then the second time around, two years later, I was selected into this really great group of folks, the 18th group of NASA astronauts that was in the year 2000. Kind of difficult for me to believe that that was over 20 years ago. And I look at this picture now, and it makes me smile, because every single one of these people in this picture, first of all, they've all flown multiple times in space. But when we took this, I probably knew them all maybe two weeks. And it's just really cool to see it now and know, you know, feel the friendship, feel like family, and to see the personality of all of them in this picture. And also to look at it and think about how, you know, back then when we sat down to take this picture, none of us got to that place in the same way. And, you know, of course, I get asked a lot by kids mostly, you know, what's the checklist? If I do these five things, will NASA pick me to be an astronaut? And sadly, there's not a checklist like that. There are, you know, basic criteria that NASA has, and I encourage every one of them to look at that. But this picture represents to me that it's really kind of wide open, besides those basic criteria. You know, there are artists and chefs and race car drivers and near professional water skiers and house builders and, you know, rock climbers in this picture. And at the same time, there's a mix of careers like engineers and fighter and test pilots and medical doctors, biologists, oceanographer, geophysicists, submariners, you know, all in this mix that came into this class of 2000. And I think that's really cool to think about how you need this diversity, you need this mix of experience to bring together to have a successful crew. I'll also share with you that our class name is the bugs and the class before you is kind of a tradition for the class before you to name you. And usually it's meant to be something kind of silly, disparaging, you know, perhaps. And we love the name though, because most bugs have wings, means you might actually get to fly. And that's unlike earlier class names like the maggots and Escargo and Sardine. So we were we were happy with our name. As you get selected to be an astronaut, there's a lot of training. It's a lot like going back to school. The first two years are really there. It's what they call astronaut candidate or ASCAN training. And to get you familiar with all of the, you know, the different spacecraft you might fly on the systems, how to do spacewalks, fly the robotic arms, speak Russian, you know, you start to learn that. But in all of it, in one way or another, we're learning how to work as a crew, how to work as a as an effective team. And we call a lot of that expeditionary training. And the absolute best example of that was to go live underwater. I had the chance to do that for 18 days on this really beautiful habitat called Aquarius that sits 60 feet underwater off the coast of Pilargo, Florida. And to work as a crew there in a very similar way to how we live and work in space on the Space Station. And actually the habitat Aquarius is about the size of a school bus. It's about the size of one of the modules we have on the Space Station. It's in an extreme environment. You're in this place where you can't just swim safely to the surface to, you know, to escape a problem. You have to figure out as a crew how to deal with challenging situations just like you would if you were on a Space Station. And this idea of crew is something that if you've read the book or when you do, hopefully you'll discover it's really one of the common themes, the underlying theme in Back to Earth. That idea of crew for my husband and I extended to how we wanted our son to understand what I was doing as I was training to be an astronaut when I would be flying in space. And so we have tried his whole life to share what we love with him like our parents had done. And so you can see his little head popping up in the back of this picture, his first flight in a small airplane. He loved it. He was maybe three years old. He's sitting on a stack of towels and was smiling big grin the entire time. Very thankful for that. Also thankful to have been able to bring him out to some of the, you know, the training where you look like you're doing astronaut stuff. And to get him exposed to that, to have him see what I was doing, to meet the people that I was going to be flying in space with so that he would know them, that he would be comfortable with them, and that he would feel like he was part of the crew. And I think that my husband and I were successful at that during the time of training and flying in space. And we've tried to continue that as he is now a 19-year-old in his first year of college, which is pretty exciting and scary to us as well. As an astronaut, what you want to do, you want to fly in space, right? And not just, I will say, not just for the adventure of it, like this picture shows the launch to space, this experience that you're looking forward to, but because when we go to space, everything we're doing there, in one way or another, is ultimately about improving life on earth. And there's certainly the excitement of launching. For me, it was on a space shuttle both times, going from this stillness kind of sitting and getting ready on the launch pad to 17,500 miles an hour, 18 or eight and a half minutes later, circling the planet. And both times that I experienced that, I went to live and work on the International Space Station. I could talk all day about this image and actually at the heart of the book, the space station in every way from the way we've brought the technology together as an international community, from the way we've developed the relationships, peacefully, successfully as this international community, that's all underlying the message in the book of this model of how on this mechanical life support system that we have purposely built to mimic what earth does for us naturally, where as a crew every day, we are acutely aware of how much CO2 is in our atmosphere, how much clean drinking water we have, the integrity of our thin metal hull, and absolutely the health and well-being of all our crewmates because we know that at a very basic level, those are the things we need to do to survive. And then when we do that, we are able to thrive in that place. Absolutely the perfect model for how we should be living and working like crewmates here on Spaceship Earth. I'll also just throw out a couple other things about this, this masterpiece in space. I mean, look at it. Best example of living off the grid that you can find. And as I said a little bit earlier, now for over 20 years, five international space programs, representing 15 different countries peacefully and successfully in this place, orbiting the planet every 90 minutes, working as the ISS motto says, off the earth, for the earth, with the intention of improving life on earth. And we build that life support system in space so that we can live and work there. This is a picture of the folks that I spent most of my three months with on the International Space Station on that first flight. You'll see there's nine people in this picture. Normally there's a crew of six or seven. And that's because three people had come up to the station before three went home. And I love this picture too. And it's like all the picture I'm showing you, it's because I love them. They have influenced my thoughts in one way or another and what I've written in the book. This picture I think, I look at it and I think you can tell that we enjoyed our time on the space station as these representatives of these 15 different countries. But at the same time I look at this and I know that when things weren't going as planned as they would sometimes, that these folks would have my back. And I'm confident that they believe the same of me, that I would be there for them as well. And this is all about a crew on a space station. But those same things I think are true for us as, you know, as we should be crewmates, not passengers here on spaceship Earth. We want to live on a planet where we're happy and healthy and we enjoy this life we're sharing with all of the other life here on Earth. But I think we also should know that we'll have each other's backs. We go to this environment in space, this microgravity environment, because we can look at things in new ways from new perspectives. We can take gravity out of the equation. And for the science side of things, we can learn all kinds of new things about stuff we thought we already really well understood. And new things come to light. And that's in pretty much any area of science that you can imagine. And I just love that we have these opportunities in these new environments to look at things this way, to bring that back to Earth, to improve life here, and also to figure out ways how to explore further off our planet. That new perspective certainly comes, you know, from observing Earth through the science instrumentation that we have on board by looking at, you know, the science inside the station and the experiments that we're working on. But we as astronauts are Earth observers as well. And I can tell you when we have free time, you will find us in places like this where we can be in a window floating there and appreciating our home as a planet from space, actually mesmerized by this place. When I got to space, I wanted to see Florida from space. I considered Florida my home. And so if I knew Florida was going to be out the window, if we were going to be traveling over that part of Earth on our current trajectory, I set an alarm and I went to that window and took a picture. But there was this kind of evolution that went on for me in looking out the window. I wanted to see the familiar of Florida. I wanted to get to know Earth, the geography of the planet. You know, just by being able to look at the window and looking at the patterns and textures and colors that I was seeing, I could tell, and while this is not a picture of a desert, I could tell if I was looking at the patterns and colors of Australia or the patterns and colors in Africa just by those, you know, that visual of the planet. And I could look out and see, you know, my space station in a whole new way and how we were traveling around the planet. And then it just got to the point where I really felt like I could best appreciate the surprises of what I'd see out the window every time. And this is a picture that it's my favorite picture from space. We were able to use like really big zoom lenses up there because they don't weigh anything. So you can easily manipulate them and kind of search for places on the planet and look for surprising things. This is a little chain of islands on the northern coast of Venezuela called Las Rocas. And I remember when I looked at it, it made me think, man, it looks like somebody has taken a big paint brush and painted a wave on the ocean. And I mean, that just really surprised me. I found that that image was the inspiration. I kept thinking about it. I had brought a water color kit with me to space. And so I was able to print that picture out and use that as the inspiration for the painting that I did while I was there. And as you can see, this is not this is not a masterpiece. This is, I mean, I would argue that, you know, maybe there are some kindergartners that could perhaps do a better painting this. But I mean, I really feel like and still do like this was one of the most special personal experiences that I had in space. And like, these are the kinds of things we're doing to put the human in human space flight and art and music and poetry. And even my my my crewmate and friend, Karen Nyberg, quilted while while she was in space, we want to bring the humanity the human to human space flight. And so that was this experience for me. As you can imagine, painting and microgravity where you saw that, you know, that ball of water floating, it's a little bit different than it would be down here on earth. In gravity, there's no cup of water to dip your brush into. So had to dip my brush into a little floating ball of water and kind of drag the colored balls of water along the paper, a really, really just interesting experience that way as well. And that one image has become inspiration for me in other ways. As I retired from NASA, I wanted to use art as a way to communicate with audiences about the incredible things that are happening in space, all of this work that's being done to to improve life on earth and how we need to really accept our role as as crewmates and not passengers here on this planet. And while I was doing that, I was introduced to some folks who were creating art with kids in pediatric cancer centers. And that evolved into creating space themed artwork. And some of these things are art spacesuits. You can see one in this picture, its name is Unity, and all of those little triangles of art are individual pieces of artwork from kids in all of the international space station countries. And our spacesuit company, ILC Dover, who made the suit I wore when I did my space walk from the space station and all of the suits that the Apollo astronauts wore walking on the moon, they have volunteered with us since the very beginning to quilt all of this artwork together into these into these art suits. Some of them, as you see, have had the chance to fly on space station. I'm going to just show you play this video really quickly to give you a little bit better view into this experience. But as the Space for Art Foundation, we have a mission where we believe we are uniting a planetary community of children through the on wonder of space exploration and the healing power of art. And I honestly feel like the experience I had in space, the opportunity to fly in space is what brought me back to earth to do this work with these people and these kids around the world. And you can see there's Gary from ILC Dover who was really the master in creating these things. Crew members having a video conference with the kids on earth. And we would pipe it into the mission control centers around the world and the hospitals and centers that participated. And then just for the kids to have the opportunity to see their artwork come together and be on this mission in space for them. Absolutely the best. And that's ongoing. We are now we're working on our latest suit which is in creation right now at ILC Dover. And I'll be taking it with me to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland next week where this suit beyond which is created from at least one piece of art from one child in every country on the planet. It will be the ambassador for spaceship earth and it will be sharing this message of the intersection between personal health and planetary health. And I can't wait to be able to share pictures of that with you sometime and hopefully beyond we'll get to fly to space as well. But coming back to this view through the window this this idea of us as earth observers. I wanted to see Florida from space. I would still want to see Florida from space and think of it as my home but Florida became a place a special place on a planet that's my home. And I'd like for you guys to leave thinking about this too. If you're in Washington D.C. I found this picture of Washington D.C. from space. I think there's no denying that these these are places that that are on a planet. There's no better image than this closing image that I'm showing you of earth rise over 50 years ago when the Apollo 8 crew shared this this view they had with their own eyes of of our planet rising above the horizon of another planetary body the moon. The best representation of who and where we all are in space together a reminder of these three simple lessons of planet earthlings and thin blue line. And if nothing else after you read the book after today's presentation I hope that you will walk away with those in mind and that you will really just latch on to your role as a crewmate not a passenger here on space ship earth. Thank you. And I will stop sharing. All right. And I am open for questions if there are any. I'm I'm I'm really really looking forward to the response to the book. I'm I'm hopeful that like I said that that you'll find that you'll find your call to action in this that you'll read something from one of the the scientists that I've spoken with one of the conservationists or you'll read about something that's going on on the International Space Station and you'll find a connection like like we as astronauts do when we look through those windows back at earth. One of the questions I get asked a lot is is how did earth look from space. We can show pictures we can show videos and I can tell you that the pictures and videos get better and better all the time of the way we actually see earth from and through the windows of our spaceships. But I remember describing to my son who was seven when I flew the first time trying to like simply describe it to him and telling him to like close his eyes and imagine the you know the brightest light bulb he's ever seen and that he splattered it with all the colors that he knows earth to be and then against the blackest black and clearest black he's ever seen that he turns on that light bulb and that he almost has to like look away before he turns it on so he knows you know he's going to have to get his eyes adjusted and just to expect that there's going to be this glowing colorful crystal clear planet out there that's set against the the blackest crystal clear black he's ever seen and that it's moving and looks alive and that you feel like I don't know that you feel like you're a part of it even even when you're not there on it like this connection that you know just is kind of in you because you know that you're home yeah so it doesn't look like we have any questions yet so I'm going to ask Tom to give me a question Tom do you have a question that you could that you could ask please that would be great and and while I'm waiting for Tom to think about his question I wanted to share behind me I have another one of our art spacesuits this one is named exploration it was built with artwork from from children in hospitals and refugee centers and some very rural schools in and over 50 countries and and again you can see I know it's a little difficult to see in the video but all of that is original artwork that I'll see Dover sewed together into this suit and we've had a chance to travel with this suit to some of the places where the the kids created the art and it's just so cool to see how I know space exploration space as a theme is inspirational and we work with these kids in places where you hope really that this is the worst thing they'll ever experience in their life and yet they share things with us as they're creating their own artwork that's you know based on I'm thinking about space exploration and they're it's like they're they've transcended they've transcended the experience they're having and they're thinking about their future they're sharing their own thoughts about their future they're sitting up straighter and stronger to talk to you about this and they're even sharing things that are to me we're just we're just stunning like beyond their year's wisdom as they just just painted and I have a distinct memory of of one young girl maybe eight years old who was at in treatment at one of the the pediatric cancer centers and we're painting and she just says to me kind of out of nowhere she's like you know mystical what you do in space as an astronaut that must be a lot like what I'm going through here in the hospital and I just remember being so shocked by that like how how can this young girl you know going through what you hope is the worst thing she ever has to experience in her life be thinking about that as what I dreamed of doing as an astronaut and then she just went on to say she's like yeah you know you don't get to see your mommy and daddy and friends the same way you can't just go outside anytime you want you have to eat all different kinds of food and they're doing all kinds of tests on you and I think you have the radiation and it was just so I don't know it was like life changing for me I mean that was what I knew okay this is my next mission in life I need to keep working with these kids we need to keep doing these kinds of projects expanding on it and helping share this message of personal and planetary health and and how space really does get us thinking about you know things that almost seem impossible and and one of the questions that I have now in the in the queue is what you know what inspired me to become an astronaut I mean this you know this love of wanting to know how things fly of of wanting to fly myself was certainly there but I think that's what opened up the opportunities for me to you know to work as an engineer with NASA as they were starting to bring this was the late 80s they were starting to get the space shuttle program up and running again after the Challenger accident and I was brought in with a whole group of other young engineers and then that time that I was there I got to see what astronauts really do and that you know 99.9 percent of their time was not flying in space but here on earth and that at least 80 percent of that as best I could tell was a lot like what I was already doing as as a NASA engineer and that the motivation for astronaut for me especially after working for NASA and seeing and believing in the work that's being done it's not it's not about the adventure of it it's about the work that we're doing in space that is helping us explore off our planet but is putting us in a position to do the best things for all life here on earth and as as space exploration continues to develop in these days of you know kind of the new commercial spaceflight activities that are going on you know we're seeing now these baby steps of space tourism and you know people doing you know suborbital flights to space as the hardware and the technology is being developed again and all with the ultimate goal of how do we lift industry off earth to the benign environment of space how do we really create this paradise on our planet where where life can thrive where all life can thrive and you know that's something that I don't know how you wouldn't want to be you know to be a part of that another question I have is what advice do I have for young people who are thinking of following it you know in my footsteps or who might want to be astronauts and it's the advice I give anybody who's thinking about whatever you know whatever goal they have in mind is really to pay attention it'll seem simple you know pay attention to what you're most curious about what really you're interested in and those kinds of things can guide not just you know the hobbies you have but the kinds of things you want to study at school the kinds of groups you want to get involved with other people that are out there that will want to be mentors for you to encourage you to lift you up I mean I found like that was a key for me was to to rely on to look to people who might see a little bit in me more than I see in myself who could help take away that doubt I had about why would they pick me and I think when we pay attention to what we're curious about when we when we do these kinds of things that that the opportunities do open up and things like being an astronaut can become possible and so so in closing I'd just like to thank everybody for participating today to thank the National Archives again for inviting me to share a little bit of the backstory behind back to earth with you and I hope that I hope that you'll read the book and that you will walk away with your own call to action as as a crewmate not passenger here on spaceship earth thank you